The work of classical composer Franz Liszt helps establish the novel’s tone. References to Liszt’s Le Mal du Pays specifically tie together Tsukuru’s memories of Shiro and Haida. The narrator calls Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage—the set of 26 piano compositions which includes Le Mal du Pays—“the vein that connected these three scattered people. […] The power of music made it possible. Whenever he listened to that music, particularly Le Mal du Pays, vivid memories of the two of them swept over him” (197).

Haida loves this piano piece. He points out that in French, Le Mal du Pays is usually “translated as ‘homesickness,’ or ‘melancholy.’ If you put a finer point on it, it’s more like ‘a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape” (51). Tsukuru’s most vivid and persistent memory of his friend Shiro is of her playing this Liszt piece. The melancholy implicit in the composition’s name seems all the more fitting when he learns of her sad demise.

Tsukuru repeatedly listens to Le Mal du Pays in moments of internal turmoil; when he does, his mood shifts toward sorrow: “the quiet, melancholy music gradually gave shape to the undefined sadness enveloping his heart, as if countless microscopic bits of pollen adhered to an invisible being concealed in the air, ultimately revealing, slowly and silently, its shape” (197).